


ink me with the Sun (I'm still breathing)

by pharadoxly



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Children ward, First Meetings, Friends to Lovers, KuroKen - Freeform, Long disease, M/M, Minor Character Death, Nekoma volleyball club does volunteering, Reunions, how precious these guys are, light angst at the beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 02:59:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5075149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharadoxly/pseuds/pharadoxly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kenma has stayed in here since little time after he learned to ride a bike, back then when he didn't know what a mechanical ventilator was needed for.<br/>He keeps surviving, until the day the Sun breaks into the ward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ink me with the Sun (I'm still breathing)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm crying I've wanted to write a kuroken hospital au for c e n t u ri e s  
> and it's not like it's one of my favorite pieces but if I don't post it now, I never will!

> _(I grew up overnight_  
>  _I played alone_  
>  _I'm playing on my own_  
>  _I survived_  
>  _Hey_  
>  _I wanted everything I never had)_

 

 

 

It's ironical, how it starts in the place where people let go of hopes.

Where beeping sounds from heartless machines are worth more than learning what a funny joke to warm that very heart is like.

And where sometimes mechanical ventilators get stuck breathing for lungs as hard as stone, when it's too late, when there's nothing anyone can do. It happens rarely, but it happens today. They never set off those ventilators for a few more minutes, as if they're still of any use. But then is clear as day what's going on, and the devices briefly buzz before disconnecting. There're people all crowded around Hazuki; Hazuki in blue pinpointed nightgown, Hazuki that breathed through a mechanical ventilator. Kenma doesn't really like crowds, noise, chaos, and his pale, small head barely peers from the lightwood doorframe, golden pupil scrutinizing adult shapes turned towards Hazuki's bed. (Kenma can't make out the kid among them, but she has to be there.)

Some adults are crying, mostly women, but Kenma is used to that.

He turns away and there's a quiet tapping sound of plain soles as he leaves room 6C. He understands. That's not his acquaintance's room anymore.

There's a guy on a yellow chair, that looks like he's waiting, and he's the only person Kenma meets on his travel to his own room, 13C. It's a child and he's perfectly healthy, although is gaze is oddly fixed on the opposite wall – there's nothing interesting in those antiseptic orange walls, so there must be something wrong. Maybe the guy's eyes got stuck like that. Kenma feels a sting of sympathy.

"Why are you staring?" The question is empty of any real emotion, and it could be said that, tucked that lack away, it wouldn't sound aggressive at all; just curious.

A simple question, but Kenma stays silent. The kid is waiting, like a pendular, for his train to somewhere very far away.

Kenma is a somehow a pendular too, but not in the same way.

"I'm sorry" the odd waiting child says, fingers laying in his lap as if they've lost sensibility, "I don't mean to be rude. I don't mean to."

He isn't rude if he's apologizing, Kenma thinks, and makes an attempt to comfort him; "It's 'kay."

The child nods, but he's nodding without resolve. "Mom is in there with my sister... How long do I have to stay here?" And Kenma now understands – he's too young to understand so many things, still too small – that the kid got lost in his own head.

Kenma shrugs. He tries to make it look slow and a little soft. "Go home."

"Yeah." This time a lock of ink-black hair falls on the kid's unfocused right eye – he just looks weirder. "With whom?" he asks, lower, and he doesn't expect Kenma to answer anymore. Maybe he never did.

Kenma lets him be, doesn't know if he will go home. He seemed lost enough on that chair. When Kenma climbs onto his bed, he turns his head away and never thinks about other people's trains again.

 

  
–––

 

 

It's ironical, how it starts in the place where people let go of hopes.

Where beeping sounds from heartless machines are worth more than learning what a funny joke to warm that very heart is like. And where sometimes mechanical ventilators get stuck breathing for lungs as hard as stone, when it's too late, when there's nothing anyone can do.

They're all little, here; young, wrapped in the same strapless nightgown, noticeably scrawnier and sort of paler versions of what would be called an average child. As if someone has stirred every color with shell-white paint and drew them all at once, with different features that all convey into the look of general discomfort of who's been pleading for something to come and doesn't ever see the glimpse of it – of wish-makers.

The last to arrive at the ward has been here for eleven months. Others – well, others don't remember what home is like. Mothers and fathers don't talk about home, even if maybe they should.

Only children stay here.

At times, visitors who care come for a while, and then go. (They don't know them. They just care.)

Some of them are here today, from four o'clock, and tomorrow, at four o'clock, they'll be good memories.

  
_"One day Rabbit was taking a walk through the jungle and ran into Elephant, who was making a fine meal of the treetops. "Hello, brother," said Rabbit."_

Tiny mouths pursue in loose smiles that suit the little girls' faces well, and it doesn't happen often that someone reads them bedtime stories without expecting them to fall asleep. No, the boy will go on and read for them, a kind brightness softening his brown eyes.

From the other side of the common room, where a group of high school boys is entertaining some children with table games, muffled laughs and giggles vibrate to the walls and back. Someone must have told a funny joke.

Lost in his reverie, Kenma's alright with feeling second-hand contentment. He's never known any highschoolers and, frankly, a few of them look quite intimidating. They're just two or three years older than him – it's odd how they seem far more mature, with the sun tattooed on their skin and the easy smiles and freedom printed on their clothes. They brought the sun inside a hospital. It's odd, but then again, Kenma guesses seventeen years old are.

There's that one, with the blonde Mohawk haircut and the loudest aptitude – he's got nice new shoes and one of the younger kids is trying to climb onto his lap. Kenma suspects he's kind of a child himself, so it's not all that surprising that he is appreciated here.

Seated behind him, quietly challenging two eight-years old girls at snakes and ladders, a guy with a small mouth and even smaller eyebrows catches Kenma's attention for a little while.

He notices everyone. No one notices him, as if the blue little chair and the book he's just pretending to be invested into, because his console was taken by the nurse, help to conceal his very presence. He decides he should bring books along when there're people around.

 

_"Elephant paused to look down at the tiny little creature at his feet and snorted. "Leave me be, Rabbit. I don't have the time to waste on someone so small."_

  
Claps of hand in quick succession can be heard just next to him, if he listens carefully. Ah, him.

He's tall, and petty much always with a grin of those that don't fit tv shows, too sharp and too alive, and that's really all Kenma knows. His living antithesis. it makes him wonder if some people really are born to balance each other; perhaps the world wouldn't be the same without opposites. Perhaps something will go wrong when Kenma dies.

All in all, it's a stupid plane of thought and he doesn't care enough about the world, anyway.

He had been expecting this to happen, though; "Hey, hey hey."

That's a weird first line to say to a person. Kenma reconsiders his concept of balancing souls, and if reality were a book it would be simple – just sliding the thumb through pages and pages till the answer comes to you in neat black characters. Answers don't die. And if they are forgotten, they're still there. Kenma wishes reality were a book almost every day.

He would have a ready reply for the grinning boy's greeting, just waiting to slip out of his mouth.

So the boy holds out a large hand. "My name is Tetsurou."

"Hello," he says, because he's supposed to.

"Who are you?"

Tetsurou is friendly, but has left the little boy he was playing with to approach Kenma, and Kenma seriously thinks that he shouldn't have. Kenma's probably not worth knowing.

"...Kenma" he murmurs, and turns back to his distraction.

"Don't you wanna play with us?"

"I'm okay."

"It's fun though" Tetsurou insists and leans against him to peek on the page, and seventeen-year-olds are slightly annoying, even if they're visitors, and visitors are _something_. "You look a little older than the others."

"I'm fourteen" Kenma replies, watching Tetsurou out of the corner of his eye. Fingertips rub the book's cover.

"Ah." A soft smile, that's all Kenma needs to see. Tetsurou won't play with him, but offer comfort. Because Kenma is not a kid, and games don't make him forget why he lives in a hospital in the first place. "So you don't have many friends, maybe."

Kenma doesn't lie, because Tetsurou seems like the sort of person who can be honest with every part of his body. "Hmm."

"We'll probably come again next friday," Tetsurou informs him, "make sure to be here."

"The nurse says I have to."

"You don't have to. But it's fun to make friends."

Maybe he shouldn't, but Kenma hears something more in those words and holds onto it. "Hmhm."

  
––

  
He calls them by name, except Kuro. He's complained a few times, but Kenma finds the nick easier on the tongue.

Every time they come, the children's ward lights up with cheeky, shy smiles and the common room feels a little warmer.

Yaku-san reads stories. His voice is benevolent, well-paced, always greeting "Good morning," with soothing enthusiasm, and when he sits down cross-legged with a huge book on his knees even Lev's murmurs go quiet. 

Yamamoto is an engine that never stops, a crackling presence, all smoke, no fire. Shouhei has huge eyes and a weirdness that's one-of-a-kind. Inuoka knows how to make you laugh.

Kuro always leaves for last, after the _Sun_. After _two years_ , Kenma thinks that he's kind of an aster of his own. And asters die too, after they've made the difference from dark to light – there aren't many books that catch Kenma's attention, but those that talk about him, or Kuro, or the guys who're turning eighteen and going to university far away from the hospital, light years from his life, surely find a place in the mystery of Kenma's mind. It's weird having someone there, something that isn't a pendulum ticking away seconds like sand grains.

  
––––

  
Two of them don't manage to say goodbye. Kenma finds their mechanical ventilators still working, when he leans on the jamb of rooms 2C and 8c after a while, when they're not anymore watery fluttering eyes, tender fingertips, blue nightgown and alive, alive, alive, but then they aren't. And Kenma also finds, insipid-mouthed, that he hadn't ever heard their first names. He's let them down, somehow. And now they're down, down.

His hair, once grown back, is dull and black like his throat and his eyes don't look very bright, his father tells him, maybe he should eat more, speak more, look what he's done, _look what he's become._

_Today is a Friday. Are they still coming on Fridays?_

_Yes they are_ , dear mother, with the sun on their clothes and their books and Kenma doesn't feel like smiling, but feels like closing his eyes. He doesn't look at bright things very often, so how can his eyes be, in any way? Kenma doesn't complain. He grabs his game, left paused on the mattress since six minutes ago when his parents brought _their_ teeth-showing smiles, _their_ hands wrinkled from adulthood and too much time spent in offices, churches, away from a house where their little boy has been missing.

His parents turn away and dad puts a hand on mom's shoulder, comforting, and maybe they're taking their train home. Together. Kenma is looking at pixels unraveling, they keep him from feeling. (almost anything.)

Then minutes flow like they always seem to do in hospital rooms. Unregular. Unsteady, like the air rushes out of lungs after a hard, hard hit; and a little like underwater, where oxygen burns away.

It stops with a light knock. The door has already been flung open, though. The knock is an unnecessary formality, almost hard to hear– "Hmm?" Kenma lazily trails on.

Kuro chuckles; he always does, but it's always strange. Easy. "Here you are!"

Kenma's fast thumbs keep pushing and pushing. It's a difficult level.

"I met your parents, just now." Kuro scrubs at his jawline, looks away, looks– resigned. And then– he looks bright and starry and _Kuro_. "I've been looking forward to this, you know?"

"Meeting dad and mom?" Kenma legitimately asks, without lifting his eyes – That's not the answer.

There's a half-sigh, probably not wanted, but there is. "You. Out of here."

Kenma doesn't know what to do but stay quiet, let others do the hard talking. "Me too." He shrugs.

"Yes, of course. I mean, of course you have. I've dropped by to see how you're going," Kuro says, hands in his pocket and loose, fascinated smile brightening up his face. "Look at you..." He's so the same that it almost feels off, today. Today of all days. "You're–"

The sentence is cut off as if a guillotine, by accident, fell on it suddenly and letal. Kenma peeks up. Kuro finds them, finds the words, and he breathes deep. "– in shape."

That's enough.

"I'm just tired," Kenma replies. The game is over but the train he's dreamed of so many times, so many nights, so suddenly feels nearer than ever. "Just tired."

–––

  
What he wasn't expecting all along was the whole Leaving Party, because nobody has ever thrown confetti in his honor since he was a toddler, probably. They cheer, and they laugh, and the sick children pull at his striped sweater in their fists (too small to fight life with), trembling farewells.

The highschoolers have packed a gift for him.

They say to open it when no one's watching.

  
–––

  
Life out of the hospital is just as strange as he liked to imagine. He has to spend another year in high school. Then he rents an apartment somewhere in Tokyo where he doesn't have to walk a lot to reach a convenience store or university; it has broken bulbs and a worn-out couch, and Kenma is skinnier than his new acquaintances, sees years through a broken light. (Maybe something is wrong, after all. Maybe it will never be this right again.)

He feels a wish in the bottom of his heart, when he's 22 and he's buying coffee between stuffed shelves, alone in an aisle that feels too empty. He talks to his mother and emotions flash behind her expression one after the other. His father isn't there to listen and be disappointed when he leaves.

Applying to nursing courses is just as tiring and sleep-stealing as he liked to imagine. But it's worth it, oh, it is.

  
He finds Yamamoto first, the engine, engine, who sprints towards him when they're crossing paths in the hall. Who points his fingers and grins funnily (he's an adult, he's not all smoke anymore,), asking, "What the heck happened to your hair?"

Kenma warily takes one lock in his fingers. "Bleached it."

Yamamoto then glances around to see if anyone else finds it as weird as him, as if he's in the position to.

  
Kuroo hasn't changed. Oh, he shaves now, but that's all there is to it.

Kuroo still believes in soulmates, and still believes in happiness; and he still laughs with children who need it and plays board games and pretends to be upset when he loses, even if the times it's intentional is laughable in comparison to the times it isn't.

Now it feels like Kenma knows him better.

Kenma meets the sight of his hands joined over the mouth, of his back curved while he waits on a yellow chair, near room 6C. Kenma knows when Kuroo is thinking hard– or when he's trying not to. His steps are quiet, on his way to him, but not soundless, and Kuroo doesn't notice anyway.

Kuroo has been staring at the orange wall for three minutes straight when he slowly lifts his eyes, and Kenma finally meets them too, as black as space where there's nothing to see, keen and full of honesty. Your mind blacks out when there's too much to think of, Kenma's once heard people say.

Kuroo is everything in the universe, Kenma thinks, good and bad. And he understands, now, that the Sun rules the world with the machines.

Recognizing each other has never been a problem to begin with and Kuroo pats the chair next to himself, pale fingers hesitating on the light plastic. Kenma puts the medical records he's carrying on his thighs when he's sat down, staring them up and down.

"Never thought I'd see you again in here," Kuroo says, voice more soothing than the hospital-hallway kind of silence.

 

Some nights, in his apartment in Tokyo where no one could hear him, Kenma used to dream of this. Because who with a human heart, holding on for dear life, could forget the boy who turned the most confusing years of a child into a wave of genuine ease, which instead of clashing against rocks and windy cliffs, before withdrawing encloses bare feet gently, freezing toes in relief. Kenma's bloodshot-eyed from the night shift, and worn-out just like his couch, and alive, and Kuroo sees ghosts in the hallways. "Life is weird."

"Apparently."

It doesn't take much thinking to know that a new startpoint just took shape before their eyes. There's not much to save of the old times, but small moments of brushing fingertips and unfinished sentences, Suns drowned out of sight while Kuroo was still _there._

 

\---

 

(Kuro's healing kisses steal away that little breath that lingers in him. Both have been chasing this for too long.)

 

–––

 

 

  
Hazuki, who even in her last days had the sharpest eye-gleam of the ward, often talked about her big brother, all proud. She wanted to see him again every day.

Kenma startles awake one night with her words redounding from one wall to the other. He covers his ears and _larger than life, kind, good. Good. Good._

Kuroo is half-sleeping when he tightens the arm around Kenma's waist, huffing against thin shoulderblades. Every breath draws tingles on Kenma, his muscles slowly relax, and he turns around as his heart, inside his chest, shakes.

He observes Kuroo through tired eyelids, catching the small motion of lips, throat. The small proofs, those that leave him with a thousand great question there's no point in voicing. Their noses bump, so gently – Kenma loves the way they do with all his heart. There's no way of knowing if he's always going to be happy like he is now, but he wishes for Kuroo to feel at home with their heartbeats next to each other, just as much as for his train not to stop until they finally reach heaven.

 

 

 

 

> _(But I survived_
> 
> _I'm still breathing_
> 
> _I'm alive)_
> 
>  

**Author's Note:**

> remember to leave a kudos/comment if you liked!! I appreciate each and every one of them so muccchh
> 
> also [here](http://pharadoxly.tumblr.com/) you have my tumblr. if you want to drop by and let me know!  
> have a great day and take care, everyone  
> *fades away singing i'm alive by sia*


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